by Lindsey Duga
The minute I walked through the door, I was hit by the smell of lemongrass chicken. It was my favorite dish, but a lot of work, so we didn’t have it often. Really, Dad only made it for two things: my birthday and when he felt bad about something.
Making me give up my summer to take care of a woman who hadn’t wanted to see me for six years definitely qualified as a lemongrass chicken occasion.
Before heading back to the kitchen, I raced upstairs to put my swim bag away and slather my skin with all-natural Vitamin E lotion. There were even more large red patches now. They were itchy and inflamed, as if my skin was furious with me for allowing so much chlorine into my system.
I’d always had sensitive skin—for as long as my shortened memory allowed—and over the years of trial and error with perplexed doctors, I’d found I could only use certain all-natural brands. My body reacted badly to anything else.
Dad didn’t like seeing the rashes. One time, after a particularly bad reaction in eighth grade, he had threatened to take me off swim team entirely. I’d panicked then. I’d finally made some friends through swimming, and the sport calmed me in a way that few things had back then.
And the flames from my past couldn’t get me underwater…
Since then, I had developed the habit of applying lotion as soon as possible afterward, only sometimes I accidentally forgot to pack it.
Heading downstairs, after my red welts calmed down to a subtle pink, I entered the kitchen and threw myself into a chair at the old wooden table.
Dad glanced over his shoulder as he stood at the stove. “Hey, honey. I hope you didn’t spoil your appetite with ice cream and Oreos,” he said with a chuckle.
I had, but that’s why leftovers were a thing. I liked to think I was practicing for college. Rather than answering, I focused on why I was getting this fantastic dinner in the first place. “Are you sure she’s going to want me there?” I asked, tracing the warped pattern in the wood with my index finger.
Dad turned back to the chicken sizzling in the lemongrass butter sauce and flipped it over in the pan, causing a cloud of steam to rise from the stovetop. “She’s your grandmother, Brye.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything. Think about Mom.”
I knew my words were harsh before they’d even tumbled out of my mouth.
Dad winced, his arm jerking slightly, sloshing the sauce and causing another billow of steam. He turned down the burner and moved to the counter littered with vegetables that still needed to be sliced.
Wordlessly, I stood from the table and walked over to my dad, wrapping an arm around him and resting my head on his shoulder.
“Sorry, Daddy. I’m just…”
He patted my arm gently. “I get it, Brye. I’m asking you to give up your summer, and summer league. If I were you, I’d be upset, too. But she’s old and needs our help. And whether or not she wants you there, she’s your grandmother. Don’t forget…her daughter left her, too.”
After losing the first ten years of my life, I hoped to never forget anything ever again.
As we prepared dinner together, both of us unusually quiet, I tried, for the millionth time, to remember more about Firefly Valley. But just like the other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine times, I couldn’t.
Firefly Valley, where my grandmother lived—and where I was born—wasn’t only where my mother had left us. It was also where our first house had burned down…with me still in it.
The fire that left me with no memories, a future without a mother, and a cluster of scars on my lower back still haunted my nightmares. Flickering flames, searing heat, thick gray smoke, and a voice calling my name over and over again…
It was partly why I loved the water so much. Why I got into the pool regardless of the way the chlorine bit at my sensitive skin. Because it gave me comfort to know that fire couldn’t reach me there.
I never told Dad about the bad dreams because he’d get that look on his face, full of pain and regret.
It wasn’t his fault, though.
In fact, no one knew whose fault it was. The firefighters had said it was a freak accident, unable to even pinpoint the origin of the fire after a week-long investigation.
Going back to the place of so much grief and so many mysteries—like how the fire started, why my mother had left only a few months after the incident, why the scars on my back didn’t look like they were made by burns—had me riddled with anxiety.
And yet…I was also insatiably curious. My childhood was practically nonexistent because of the fire. Who had I been before my life got a hard reboot?
Of course, if I told my father any of that, he’d worry even more. I didn’t want that. He’d been through enough.
We both had.
So I would get through this summer with a sunny caretaker attitude reminiscent of Mary-Freaking-Poppins.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Dad said, breaking our silence. “Why don’t you see if Izzie wants to go with you?”
I paused in cutting my chicken. “Do you think Willa would be okay with that?”
“The way I see it, she’d be getting two caretakers for free. I’m sure it’ll be fine. And don’t call her Willa. That’s disrespectful,” he said, then took a sip of his iced tea.
I didn’t know what else to call her. And I had my doubts everything would be fine, but if he was giving me the okay to bring Izzie, there was no way I would pass that up.
…
“Um, hell yeah, I wanna go!” Izzie shouted.
Wincing, I jerked my phone away from my ear then brought it back to my cheek with a relieved laugh. “Iz, are you sure? Think of what you’d be giving up. That’s a whole summer without social media or a Starbucks within walking distance.”
“If I stay here, I’ll be giving up a summer without you, and that is simply unacceptable.”
Izzie’s tone was joking, but I knew that on the rare occasions when she said touchy-feely stuff like that, she meant it.
“What about summer league?”
“It’s not like it’s the school team. They’ll be fine. Besides, summer league is for keeping in shape, and we already have rockin’ bods, so no worries there. Oh! We can go hiking in the mountains!”
I turned over on the bed, kicking my legs up in the air, and laughed. I loved my friend’s optimism, and she also seemed to understand, without me even having to tell her, that this was a “delicate family situation.” It was a phrase I’d often heard her mother use.
Mrs. Jennison said it every time I’d wake up in the middle of the night during a slumber party and cry for my dad to come pick me up, when most people felt I was “too old for that type of behavior.” Or when I’d refused to go on a Girl Scout camping trip when I was twelve because I was scared of sitting around a fire.
“So…” There was a long pause on the other line, then I heard Izzie snap her laptop closed, a telltale indication she was about to get serious. “How are you feeling about going back there?”
While most of my friends, the few close ones that I had, steered away from my weird, trauma-filled past, Izzie always rammed into the topic like a car wreck. She also didn’t let things go.
I both loved and hated this about her.
I played with the fringe of the throw blanket on my bed and stared up at the ceiling, choosing my words carefully. “I’m nervous,” I admitted. “Apart from the fact that I’m not going to know how to even talk to this woman, I’m worried I’m going to get there and not feel something.”
“What do you mean?” Izzie asked.
Losing ten years of your life will mess with you. It felt like a giant hole was inside me. Someone had carved out a piece of Briony Redwrell and left it to burn in that awful fire. At first, I tried to be okay. For Dad. He was messed up, too. But then, half a year after moving to Knoxville, I did something wholly unexplainable. I wasn’t sure why I
did what I did. Just, one day I was telling myself I was okay, then the next I’d wandered into the woods of the nearest park. The entire neighborhood went on an epic search to find me. They found me curled up under the biggest tree in the park, dirt all over my clothes, and surrounded by a bunch of shredded wildflowers.
After seeing what my meltdown had done to Dad, I learned how to look to the past without feeling anything. Essentially, I drew up a wall between the time before Knoxville and the time after. I took all those empty, missing pieces of my life, this gigantic void inside me that told me I was only half of who I was, and locked them up in a box and threw away the key.
In cutting off that part of me, eventually, I became okay. Happy, even.
I made friendship bracelets with Izzie. I took swimming classes. Learned how to bake. Read a lot of books—and I mean a lot.
On the outside, I was a normal teenage girl. I was like a remodeled house from an earlier era, with hip new wallpaper covering the tattered walls.
A guidance counselor had once told me: losing your memories means you start fresh. You don’t have anything to haunt you. Except for maybe the loss of what you once had.
That had always stuck with me.
I twirled a wavy strand of light-brown hair that had escaped from my ponytail around my finger and thought about what Izzie was asking me.
“I mean,” I said finally, “what I really want to find there is something I can connect to.” My voice was a little tight, and I wasn’t sure my words made any sense, but Izzie was the only person in the world I could admit this to. “My amnesia stole my childhood. If I go there and feel nothing, then…”
There’ll be this big hole inside me forever.
I realized I didn’t want that. Maybe this was the opportunity I needed. Maybe this was what people meant by “closure.”
I could do this. I’d had to live with amnesia, with mystery and loss, but now I could actually heal these wounds by going back to this place. Whether or not I found what I’d been missing for so long, I could finally face my past head-on and say you can’t hurt me anymore.
Once and for all.
“You’ll still be you,” Izzie said, so quietly I barely heard her.
I smiled at the ceiling fan slowly turning hypnotically above me.
Izzie was my only friend who knew everything. She knew that Mom had left in the middle of the night after a shouting match with my father. She knew that Dad had been so hurt that he didn’t go after her. She knew how hard it was for me to not feel bitter toward my mother.
More than anything, she knew me, and I was glad for it.
“You’re right, but I think…I think I’m ready to find out who I was. Before.”
She was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped. Finally she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow at nine—and I’m driving, so don’t you dare leave without me.”
…
Forty minutes into the drive, Izzie and I had switched to my Spotify. We had lost all radio signals and grew tired of the Blue Ridge Mountains’ number one hit: Static Pop. It was on all the stations, with some slight variation—Static Country, Static Oldies, Static Rock…
I stared out the window, watching the mountain scenery. The trees gave way to sloping hillsides and meadows lined with…yet more trees. While repetitive, the Tennessee countryside was beautiful. Summer wildflowers covered the meadow below, and the forest was alive with shadows and spots of sunlight peeking through the leaves. Beyond the trees and meadows, the Smoky Mountains stretched before us. It seemed as though no matter how far we drove, we never got any closer. We just stayed at their base, chasing after them.
Izzie, bless her, had tried to start a conversation several times, but I couldn’t focus long enough to continue a single one. In fact, before I’d had time to quell the ball of anxiety rolling around in my stomach, Izzie was turning down the long driveway to my grandmother’s house.
It was like something out of a fairy tale. I was Little Red Riding Hood visiting her sick grandmother deep in the woods. The house had two stories and a brick chimney on the side, overgrown with ivy. Really, the whole place was a bit rundown. But that only added to its charm. The siding might have once been blue, because the painted wood was a light kind of periwinkle, probably faded by time and baked by sunlight. Flowers grew everywhere—on the little pathway up to the porch, winding their way up into the short white fence that separated the garden from the rest of the wilderness—even though the garden was a bit wild itself.
For just a brief moment, I recalled sitting on that very porch, Dad’s car packed with the few things that had survived the fire, and trying to block out the voices from within. The confused, angry voices that talked about a woman who just up and left her family.
Izzie nudged me, giving me a questioning look, as if to say it’s not too late to turn back. But it was too late. Six years too late. For so long, this valley and my unknown toxic past had hung over me.
Well, no more. I was ready to face it.
“Thanks for coming with, Iz,” I said, still staring at the quaint cottage. “You’re the best.”
“Of course I am. It’s why I’ve got the finest jewelry in the world.” She held up her wrist, showing off the friendship bracelet of blue and orange thread I’d made for her over two years ago.
“That thing is so old. Let me make you a new one.”
“Are you kidding? I’ve planned entire wardrobes around this bracelet. Getting a new one would throw off my fashion statement.”
With a laugh, I opened the car door. The sound of nature was surprisingly loud—the buzzing of insects, the rustling of leaves from the birds, and the trickling water from a nearby brook. And the smell—it was sweet from the flowers and fresh from the leaves and mint plants. The combined scents brought on an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia.
Exactly how I felt nostalgia was a mystery, since I’d forgotten roughly ninety percent of my time in these mountains, but I recognized the feeling.
As soon as my feet touched the ground, the world seemed to tilt beneath me. It was just for a moment. A split second, even, but enough for me to feel it.
Then my world shifted back, and in that same instant, I felt like I’d just lost something. The pain came so sharp and sudden I sucked in a breath—and then found I was gasping for another reason. I was…crying.
Touching my eyelashes, my fingertips came away wet. Why?
As quickly as it had come on, though, the feeling was gone, like it’d never been there in the first place.
“Brye? Hey, you okay?” Iz asked, leaning over the hood of the CRV, tilting her sunglasses into her hair and squinting at me.
“I’m okay,” I said hurriedly, trying to cover up the catch in my throat. “It must be all this pollen in the air making my eyes water.”
Thinking the strange feeling might have come from my asthma, I took a moment to regulate my breathing. Only, I found it easier than usual. Actually, much easier, as if my asthma had vanished entirely. The air that flowed in and out of my lungs was crisp and fresh, and it almost tasted sweet.
The two of us followed the little stone path through the wild garden. I recognized flowers I’d never seen before but knew the names of, like cherry-red zinnias, violet-globe amaranths, golden-petaled black-eyed Susans, and then herbs like basil and coriander. From flowers to trees, I somehow knew every plant’s name. I’d always been like that. After the thirtieth weird look from a kid in my biology class, I caught on that this ability wasn’t exactly normal. Had Willa taught me, and I somehow retained their names past the amnesia?
After climbing the porch steps, I opened the screen door and winced as it screeched on its hinges. I knocked and waited. Then, beyond a lace curtain over the door’s oval window, a silhouette came into view, and my heart skipped painfully.
Izzie gave my arm a reassuring squeeze as the door opened, and I came face-to-
face with both a stranger and my grandmother.
Willa Kaftan, while, old and wrinkled, was beautiful. Natural beauty like hers couldn’t be destroyed by age. It was as if her white, white hair was the result of something more magical than just time. She wore an old T-shirt for a band that was popular in the sixties, a flowery skirt, and an apron stained by countless meal preparations over the years. She was balancing on crutches, her foot wrapped in a hot-pink cast.
I wondered if the color was because of her doctor’s sense of humor or Willa’s own preference for Barbie pink circa the new millennium.
For a moment, my words stalled in my mouth, remembering Dad’s comment. What should I call her? She was a stranger to me in almost every way, and yet…
I had known her before. Something inside me told me I did.
The name was out before I’d even thought it. But it felt right somehow.
“Hi, Gran.”
Chapter Three
“Briony,” Gran whispered. Her soft brown eyes were wide behind tortoiseshell frames, and as the seconds passed, while I stood awkwardly, they grew glassy. She raised a trembling hand to her mouth with a gasp that sounded like a suppressed sob.
Then her eyes grew sharp. “I told Jim that I didn’t need any…” She trailed off as she noticed the girl standing behind me. “And who’s this?”
“My friend, Isabelle Jennison.”
“Call me Izzie. Nice to meet you,” she said cheerfully, maneuvering her way around me to hug my grandmother. The look of surprise on Gran’s face was pretty priceless as Izzie pulled back and took her by the shoulders. “Whatever you need, Mrs. Kaftan, we got you. We’re your girls.”
Gran simply stood there, mouth opening and closing but nothing coming out. She looked from me to Izzie and, shoulders sagging, stepped back to allow us into her home. “Well, come in, then.”
The house was warm and welcoming with the exception of a few shadowy corners tucked away from the windows. Dust motes floated in the vast patches of sunlight. Tiny figurines of fairies and elves sat on wooden shelves. Bookcases overflowed with both paperbacks and hardbacks. Pictures covered the walls, and quilts hung on the back of worn furniture.
